DAKAR – For a foreign correspondent in Mali, the assignment seemed like a dream: as Islamic extremists upended the region, Olivier Dubois, a French journalist, secured a rare interview with a leader of JNIM, an al-Qaida’s affiliate in the Sahel.

Or so he thought. En route to the interview in Gao, northern Mali, in April 2021, Dubois, a correspondent for Libération and Jeune Afrique publications, was kidnapped.

He spent 711 days in desert captivity, sleeping chained to a tree, eating dried goat meat and plotting his escape. Nearly two years after his release, he recounts his ordeal in a book released Thursday in France that draws heavily on notes Dubois secretly kept during his captivity, written on any scrap of paper he could find.

“One of the main factors that helped me resist and survive was telling myself that I am a journalist,” Dubois told The Associated Press in the first interview for English-language media since his release. “Let’s continue to gather information, let’s continue to ask questions and pretend I’m working.”

The Sahel countries of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in recent years have been upended by military coups and are now led by military juntas, which struggle against rising extremist violence and have made kidnappings a cornerstone of their strategy in the region.

Upon his release, French media published an investigation revealing that Dubois’s fixer had worked with French intelligence, who used him to locate the extremist leader he was trying to interview.

Dubois told the AP he knew his project was risky, but that he trusted his fixer too much and ignored the warning signs.

“I’m not sure,” he said of the circumstances surrounding his kidnapping. “I think it was a betrayal. But the motive for the betrayal is not yet clear. I have not spoken to my fixer since I have been released.”

Kidnappings have skyrocketed in the Sahel in recent years, according to data from the U.S.-based Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, or ACLED.

JNIM, the Sahelian branch of al-Qaida, has been responsible for most of the 1,468 kidnappings in Sahel and Benin between 2017 and 2025, according to the ACLED. The group relies on ransom money to fund their operations and on the fear they instill on local populations to keep them in check.

Dubois recalled being told he would be “released quickly” if his family and government did as instructed.

Dubois was released on March 20, 2023, in Agadez, Niger, but details of his release, including whether a ransom was paid, remain undisclosed.

French President Emmanuel Macron took to the social platform X to write “Olivier Dubois is free,” but he did not elaborate on the conditions of the release.

Speaking to the AP, Dubois said that he did not know the details either, but he recalled being told by the rebels that ransoms varied by nationality. As a French citizen, he was worth 10 million euros, he was told. A South African was worth 50 million.

Having covered numerous hostage stories in the region, Dubois knew that even if freed, his ordeal could be lengthy.

In order to stay sane, he became obsessed with plotting an escape. But after the fourth unsuccessful attempt, his captors staged a mock execution and threatened to kill him if he tried again. So instead, Dubois started reading the Quran.

Reading the holy book of Islam served a dual purpose: it occupied his mind, and helped him understand his captors better, be able to discuss with them and build a relationship, so they could treat him more as a human being and less as an anonymous hostage.

Unexpectedly, it also put him on a more spiritual path.

“I am a former atheist, then an agnostic who thought I’d stop there,” he said. “Reading the Quran made me want to read other religious texts. This captivity has been the beginning of a journey that will perhaps lead me to God — or not.”

Now that his book — “Prisonnier du désert, 711 jours aux mains d’Al-Qaïda,” which translates in English into “Prisoner of the desert, 711 days in the hands of Al-Qaida” — is out, Dubois said he was hoping he was ready to go back to journalism and move on.

But the experience still haunts him.

“It was painful labour,” he said of the writing process. “The first reflex after finishing it was to distance myself from the story, hoping time will pass and, maybe, all of that will be behind me. But I don’t really know if that’s possible.”